[vtk-developers] Thoughts on changelog maintenance?

[Ben Boeckel]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 22:46:29 +0100, Jon Haitz Legarreta wrote:
> But what's the advantage of keeping a changelog per MR/topic if the
> subject of the topic is meaningful or self-contained?

So that when we cut a release, we already have a set of "here's what is
important" to pull from instead of looking at commit logs and trying to
figure out what's important (and then amending it if the code is later
updated or even removed).

> May be some mechanism can be developed to ping automatically
> contributors that have MRs for a given release, and submit the
> summaries to Gitlab? I ignore whether currently a script exists to
> gather all merged MRs for a release; then all contributors GitLab user
> could be gathered and may be an issue in GitLab could be opened with a
> pre-defined message asking all contributors to provide a summary in an
> .md file/format?

The issue is that code that got in today may have changed until the
release and therefore the release note could be inaccurate.

> Finally, may be sectioning in the changelog (manual consolidation step
> or in the simple ticket gathering) is also relevant: using Elvis'
> feed, should it have a pre-defined sectioning (like enhancements per
> module, documentation improvements, language/compiler/platform
> support/compatibility changes, new tests, examples, etc.)?

Personally, I'm more interested in gathering the information right now.
I'm not sure of the best *format* for that information however (the
sample file is just a section with bullet point(s) for items). Gitlab
upstream uses something much more structured[1]. I'd be OK with finding
out what's working or not as far as format goes as we see what
information turns out to be useful and/or expected.

--Ben

[1]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/changelogs/unreleased/1312-time-spent-at.yml